Most companies throughout the United States use the services of the United States Postal Service (USPS) to communicate with their customers. These companies use the USPS to deliver monthly bills, monthly statements, annual reports for shareholders, catalogs for holiday shopping, newspapers, monthly magazine subscriptions, and Standard Mail (A) direct mail.
The cost associated with moving mail from the sender to the recipient is related primarily to the manual effort involved. The mail must go through several sorting processes and eventually be sorted down to the carrier delivering the mail.
The USPS has issued approximately 42,000 five digit zip code in order to improve the automatic sortation and delivery of mail. If mail pieces are pre-sorted by large mailers it becomes easier for the USPS to process the mail.
The USPS has spent billions of dollars to automate this process. The intent of automation is to process the mail faster while minimizing costs. To minimize costs, automated equipment has been manufactured and data processing methods have been implemented. The data processing methods were created so that the mailers themselves could perform certain tasks that would make it easier for the USPS to process the mail. The USPS passes the labor savings on to any mailer who shares in the work in the form of postage discounts. This is known as “work sharing.” There are a number of tasks that a mailer can perform to obtain work sharing discounts. The more work the mailer performs, the greater the discounts.
The USPS offers work share discounts for mailings that meet certain address, barcode and sortation standards so as to allow the mailing to bypass certain processing steps and expedite the mailing process. These special discounts are called ‘workshare’ discounts. Mailings that meet ‘workshare’ standards qualify for discount ‘automation’ rates (5-digit/scheme, 3-digit/scheme, AADC (Automated Area Distribution Centers), Mixed AADC). For example, to qualify for the 5-digit/scheme rate, a tray with a minimum of 150 pieces must be destined to the same 5-digit zip code (e.g., 06512. To qualify for the 3-digit/scheme rate, a tray with a minimum of 150 pieces must be destined to the same 3-digit zip code 068XX (Stamford, Conn.), 120XX (Albany, N.Y.), 191XX (Philadelphia, Pa.), 465XX (South Bend, Ind.) and to qualify for the AADC rate a tray with a minimum of 150 pieces must be destined to the same AADC. To qualify for mixed AADC all remaining pieces placed in trays are required to be mixed AADC.
The following rates and fees apply to one-ounce First Class automation letters:
5-digit/scheme$0.2933-digit/scheme$0.308AADC$0.317Mixed AADC$0.326
The workshare process is utilized by individual large mailers and/or by mailers inconjunction with postal presort operations that combines mailers mailings to obtain postal workshare discounts. When the mailings of individual mailers are combined and/or mailings of multiple mailers are combined by a postal presort operation to achieve workshare discounts, the individual mail pieces are physically sorted to sequence, interleaving mail pieces from the combined mailings.
A disadvantage of the prior art is that a large portion of the workshare processes is performed after the mail pieces are created.
A further disadvantage of the prior art is that the fold address combination of the document must fit in the same physical envelope for all mail pieces in the mail run.